Analysis Of The Dream Of The Rood

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The Greatest Battle Ever Won The Dream of the Rood is the earliest dream-vision poem in the English language and one of the central documents of Old English Literature. This particular work is a monologue based on the point of view of the Rood ( also known as a cross) from the biblical story of the Crucifixion of Christ. The Dream of the Rood stands apart from other stories in that it is not only a monologue, but the speaker is an inanimate object (the Rood or cross), and not only that; but the object is also given a personality. The poem starts out with a vision of the Rood being raised up and adorned in gold and fine jewels. “that emblem was entirely cased in gold; beautiful jewels were strewn around its foot, just as five studded the crossbeam” It moves to notice a spot of blood that had stained the right side and from there the Rood begins to recount its experience of what had happened when one of the greatest battles that ever told took place. …show more content…

Many Anglo-Saxon poems use the characteristics of heroism and imagery, but it seems as though the way that the theme is treated in the story of the Crucifixion, is unique onlynto Christian poetry. Using a battle as a metaphor, Christ and the cross would be considered the warriors, “whose deaths are victories, and whose burials are preludes to the triumph of their Resurrections" (Huppe 278). In The Dream of the Rood, the story of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ is different from the accounts that we are so used to hearing in the Bible. In order to emphasize the enormous victory in the story of the crucifixion, the writer describes Christ as a young warrior who boldly goes in to defeat sin. This is a very common theme in Medieval literature. Where the warrior goes in to defeat a particular evil. The words that are used to describe Christ are “young warrior”, “the Lord of Mankind”, and “the Lord of

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